Why Donald Trump Is Wrong About Manufacturing Jobs and China

A worker inspects the metal frame of a Ford Escape S.U.V. at an assembly plant in Louisville, Kentucky. Factory jobs are on the rise in the U.S., and many of these new jobs are coming back to North America from China.

Photograph by Luke Sharrett / Bloomberg via Getty

Not long ago, a video mocking Donald Trump’s obsession with China was posted on YouTube, a mashup splicing together some two hundred and fifty instances in which he has said “China” during his speeches. The context of his remarks on the subject, inexorably, is this: “They’re stealing our jobs; they’re beating us in everything; they’re winning, we’re losing.” These sentiments have struck a chord with many struggling Americans, particularly those in the unemployed and underemployed working class.

The message has resonated so well, in fact, that other Presidential candidates have felt compelled to demonstrate a properly high level of indignation toward China’s economic prowess. Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton, for instance, have complained about the country’s underhanded trade practices and their impact on American jobs. And then there’s Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of globalization. “Corporate America said, ‘Why do I want to pay somebody in Michigan a living wage when I can pay slave wages in Mexico or China? We’re going to shut down, we’re going to move abroad, we’re going to bring those products back into this country,’ ” he said at last week’s Democratic debate, in Flint, Michigan. “They’re going to start having to, if I’m President, invest in this country.”

It’s a simple and effective pitch, with a ready set of scapegoats. But despite what the rhetoric would have us believe, global manufacturing is trending in a positive direction for the U.S. Factory jobs are on the rise here, and many of these new jobs are coming back to North America from China, which is struggling to maintain its manufacturing capacity. Since March, 2010, when manufacturing employment in the U.S. hit a trough of 11.45 million jobs, nearly a million new factory positions have been created, most of them in the Southern states, particularly North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Better still, the jobs are typically good ones: across that same five-year period, average hourly manufacturing wages have increased over ten per cent, to more than twenty dollars. On the whole, U.S. manufacturing, as measured by the Purchasing Managers’ Index, has steadily expanded.

Meanwhile, according to Quanton Data, which tracks global job postings by industry, open manufacturing positions in China have been dropping consistently since 2012, down nearly six per cent in that time. In January, the country’s Ministry of Commerce reported that factory activity has contracted for six months, falling to a three-year low. In addition, foreign direct investment in Chinese manufacturing was flat for all of 2015, while China’s balance of trade with the U.S. barely budged, despite the strong dollar. Moreover, China’s exports tumbled in February by twenty-five per cent, after falling eleven per cent in January.

The picture that emerges from these statistics is much more nuanced than the one the Presidential candidates are offering: it reveals China to be something less than a rapacious economic winner, and the U.S. to be enjoying an industrial resurgence that seemed unimaginable a decade ago. There are many blue-collar workers who have been left out of this picture, to be certain, but if the candidates truly want to help those people, they should begin by at least acknowledging the recent shifts in global manufacturing and understanding their genesis and impact.

Perhaps the biggest stimulant to American manufacturing is the move toward reshoring. In recent years, companies have increasingly been bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. from China and other countries. The practice received its most public boost in 2012, when General Electric announced plans to invest a billion dollars in an appliance plant in Louisville, Kentucky, reshoring four thousand jobs that had been in China and Mexico, and adding, over time, nearly twenty thousand factory positions at the plant’s regional suppliers. Walmart has also helped to stoke demand for U.S. manufacturing, thanks to an initiative, launched in 2013, to purchase an additional two hundred and fifty billion dollars worth of American-made goods by 2023, which it hopes will create as many as three hundred thousand new jobs.

Economists and manufacturing experts have assembled convincing statistics which demonstrate that these moves were part of a broader trend. According to data provided to me by the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit trade organization, in the past five years, about a hundred thousand manufacturing jobs have returned to the U.S. from overseas, sixty per cent of them from China. If you fold in new U.S. plant openings by companies headquartered elsewhere (that is, foreign direct investment in manufacturing), the number jumps to two hundred and fifty thousand. An additional fifty thousand jobs were saved when companies that had planned to go offshore changed their minds.

What’s more, thirty-one per cent of respondents to the Boston Consulting Group’s 2015 survey of U.S. manufacturing executives said that, in the next five years, their companies are likely to add factory capacity in the U.S. for goods sold domestically, while only twenty per cent were planning to do so in China. The share of executives saying that their companies were actively reshoring production had increased by nine per cent since the 2014 survey, and by about two hundred and fifty per cent since 2012.

Meanwhile, offshoring has slowed considerably. Harry Moser, the president of the Reshoring Initiative, told me that, since 2007, the annual increase in the number of companies offshoring has dropped from six per cent to two and a half per cent, and that, for the past couple of years, for every new job offered by U.S. companies overseas, an equal number of positions have been reshored. Plus, though it is impossible to tell how many of the new offshoring positions are aimed at producing products to sell in overseas markets, as opposed to back in the U.S., based on my interviews with multinational executives over many years, such sales increasingly comprise a high proportion of this activity.

For most businesses, the calculus in favor of reshoring or maintaining existing U.S. operations is obvious. Chinese hourly manufacturing wages rose about twelve per cent a year, on average, between 2000 and 2013. Add to that the ready availability of inexpensive oil and natural gas in the U.S., which was a boon for energy-intensive industries even before the plunge in petroleum prices, and the average cost to produce goods in the U.S. is only five per cent higher than in China, according to a separate Boston Consulting Group report.

But the decision to manufacture in the U.S. isn’t solely about dollars and cents. Rather, it’s a function of the quality of the U.S. workforce—its noteworthy productivity and its easy familiarity with lean-factory principles—as well as the need for companies to react quickly to changes in domestic consumer demand. As Jeff Immelt, the C.E.O. of General Electric, put it in 2013: “Today, the product is the process, more or less. If you look at an aircraft engine, the content of labor is probably less than five per cent. We have two hours of labor in a refrigerator. So it really doesn’t matter if you make it in Mexico, the U.S., or China. Today it’s really about globalization, not about outsourcing; it’s how do I capture markets faster than the competition?”

Even small businesses, which tend to depend on cheaper labor to remain viable, are seeing the wisdom in Immelt’s argument. John Strotbeck, a former Olympic rower and the founder and C.E.O. of the Philadelphia-based team-uniform maker Boathouse Sports, told me that his company tried a few years ago to start manufacturing some of its sports apparel in China, but brought the production line back to a factory in Philadelphia soon afterward. The main factor was the lead time from when a customer placed an order to delivery. “Six months, and today it is even longer,” he said, of timelines at Chinese factories. “Compare that to how fast we can be now: average from the date of the order to out the door is twenty working days. And our workers are flexible; they can work anywhere in the factory and on any equipment. If all of a sudden we get a spike in demand for Gortex outerwear, a labor-intensive product, we can shift more resources and take advantage of it.”

So why, given the improving American manufacturing landscape, are politicians finding success with the message that a mixture of bad trade deals, political incompetence, and economic miscalculation has brought the U.S. to its knees? The answer is that, although reshoring is benefitting many blue-collar workers, it isn’t, as James Surowiecki wrote in the magazine in February, helping a significant part of the U.S. working class. These are the kinds of people who once held relatively low-paying, low-proficiency factory positions in industries like electronics, textiles, basic housewares, furniture, steel, and paper products.

Many of those jobs remain lost—since 1979, when the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. peaked at nineteen and a half million, the country is still down some seven million factory positions, all told. And the kernel of truth in the political rhetoric about China is that many of those jobs were originally lost to that country, although by no means a majority of them (outsourcing began in 1970, well before China became a global economic force). But the more low-skilled of those positions are not, despite Trump’s claims, among those that could be brought back to the U.S. Nor are they ones that Americans would necessarily want to see returned. Typically, the lost jobs involve making products, like T-shirts or pressed-wood desks and chairs, that are now profitable to manufacture only if labor costs are at a bare minimum, and that companies can afford to maintain excess inventories of in order to obviate concerns about lead times and transportation costs.

The American manufacturing resurgence hasn’t helped many of the country’s blue-collar workers who were let go in the past two decades, including many who were pink-slipped during the last recession, in part because the modern factory environment is driven by high-tech equipment, robotics, flexible scheduling, and lean techniques. These factories depend on workers who are adept at programming and overseeing high-tech equipment; able to handle multiple jobs throughout the factory as product demand shifts, rather than a single station on an assembly line; and proficient enough with manufacturing concepts that they can recommend plant improvements, large and small, on their own.

Given this, what would arguably help underemployed U.S. workers the most is retraining, so that their skills match the requirements of the better-paying jobs in U.S. factories. In turn, this would, as Immelt and Strotbeck’s remarks suggest, encourage companies to reshore more jobs. Federally funded technical-education programs, perhaps in conjunction with community colleges, are one approach to that end. Tax inducements could also be offered to U.S. companies that establish factory-floor apprenticeships allowing workers to upgrade their skills. Raising the minimum wage should be considered as well, because it gives companies the incentive to protect profit margins by improving worker productivity and capabilities.

The potential for real progress in this realm makes the campaign-trail bluster about winning back jobs from China all the more repellent. It offers false hope to the very workers with whom it purports to be in sympathy, while neglecting their real needs. Saying “China” over and over is far easier than understanding the relationship between its economy and ours, though—and it seems, unfortunately, to be working for Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Rothfeder is a former editor-in-chief of the International Business Times and a former national news editor at Bloomberg News. His latest book is “Driving Honda: Inside the World’s Most Innovative Car Company.”